Volume 37, Number 19 · December 6, 1990
Did Jefferson Blunder?
By Eric L. McKitrick
Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson
by Robert W. Tucker, by David C. Hendrickson
Oxford University Press, 360 pp., $24.95
What remains of the once formidable Jefferson industry[1] may be sore pressed to weather Empire of Liberty, which is a little like a leveraged takeover by less-than-friendly outsiders. But the raiders, Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson, political scientists rather than historians, have finally made a place for what should have been all along the settled historical understanding of Jeffersonian statecraft. The version of international dealing that was promoted by Thomas Jefferson, as first secretary of state and later as third president, set a tone and pattern for America's handling of its foreign affairs that has remained strikingly persistent, and was specially attractive from the outset to the citizenry of the first popularly based republic of modern times. You get what you want without paying for it, or wave away calculations of what the eventual price might be, because your requirements need make no real provision for 'payment' at all. They are self-evident, engraved in principles of right, justice, and liberty, and thus by and large non-negotiable. The vocabulary was, and has remained until perhaps very recently, that of solemn high-mindedness.
Review, 3562 words
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